The 8 Ps of Services Marketing

Marketing professionals and specialist use many tactics to attract and retain their customers. These activities comprise of different concepts, the most important one being the marketing mix. Services are radically different from products and need to be marketed very differently. It is essential to balance the 4Ps or the 7Ps of the marketing mix. The concept of 4Ps has been long used for the product industry while the latter has emerged as a successful proposition for the services industry.

So the classical 4 P structure of the Marketing Mix needs to be modified suitably to incorporate the 8 Ps for services marketing, which was previously known as the 7 Ps only.

Services can range from financial services provided by the banks to technology services provided by the IT company or hospitality services provided by hotels and restaurants or even a blog where an author provides a service (information presentation, interesting reading etc) to his audience. Services marketing are dominated by the 7 Ps of marketing namely Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical evidence.

The 7 P framework is one of the most popular framework for deciding a marketing strategy, right from strategy formulation to actual implementation.

The following form the marketing mix for services marketing, the first 4 P’s being the core and the next 3 P’s being the extended marketing mix. (рисунок к этому предложению)

• Product is your core offering.This is “the thing” that will fulfill the needs of your customer. If your product is faulty, every thing else fails. The attributes of the product, vis-a-vis the attributes offered by competing products and substitutes, are important in estimating the competitive scenario for the marketing strategy formulation.
• Price has a lot of impact on the service buyer’s satisfaction level. Often, paying a higher price makes a customer more satisfied. Price is often considered a proxy for quality and vice-versa. What is important to note that services being all the more intangible, the price becomes an important factor for the actual service consumption to happen, after service awareness and service acknowledgement.
• Place often offers a different side of value (utility) to the customer. Who would want to travel 10 miles to have a regular dinner, even if that is priced very competitively and has a super quality? Services are often chosen for their place utility. Closer to the customer means higher probability of purchase. Place utility is important to evaluate, for strategizing on the other 6 Ps.
• Promotion plays a role in the perception the possible target audience may have about your service. There has to be a fit between the promotion and the positioning. Promotion leads to service (brand) recognition and further establishes a proxy to evaluate quality of services based by potential customers. Many different promotional tools are often used like internet advertisement, special events, endorsements which happen out of the store or in-store merchandising like plastic dump bins and digital signage.
• People are crucial in service delivery. The best food may not seem equally palatable if the waitress is in a sour mood. A smile always helps. Intensive training for your human resources on how to handle customers and how to deal with contingencies, is crucial for your success.
• Processes are important to deliver a quality service. Services being intangible, processes become all the more crucial to ensure standards are met with. Process mapping ensures that your service is perceived as being dependable by your target segment.
• Physical evidence affects the customer’s satisfaction. Often, services being intangible, customers depend on other cues to judge the offering. This is where physical evidence plays a part. Would you like eating at a joint where the table is greasy or the waitresses and cooks look untidy and wear a stained apron? Surely you would evaluate the quality of your experience through proxies such as these.

Services marketing is that elusive concept which stays incomplete without a thorough understanding of 7 Ps. These form the critical success factors for any service as evaluated by a possible customer.

Another P which has grown in significance in Services Marketing is the 8th P, namely Productivity and Quality. While everyone knows about the 7 Ps of services marketing, the 8th P of Services Marketing has emerged in research very recently.

In integral services management, improving productivity is a requisite in cost management; but quality, as defined by the customer, is essential for a service to differentiate itself from other providers.

It has been recognized that overall profitability of a firm may be greatly impacted by focusing on not only at the top-line by improving sales but also focusing on the bottom-line by lowering over-all cost of delivering services. In services management, often the variable costs are a lot more than fixed costs, and so incremental costs, if managed properly can have a huge impact on productivity. So for services, a firm may greatly benefit through proper re-engineering of processes and remodeling the same if required to improve productivity at each stage.

It has also been established in research that process improvements deliver better standardization and hence better quality in services. Quality perception is a crucial differentiating factor on services management and for long term sustainability of the same. Business Process Remodeling can lead to major process efficiency improvements which again can impact overall quality as is actually delivered by the firm and is also perceived by the customers / clientele.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-17